Death, Taxes, and a Chocolate Cannoli (A Tara Holloway Novel) (2 page)

He set the paper aside and stood. I followed him over to the woman, who simply lifted her chin in acknowledgment, turned, and led us down the hall and around the corner to a small elevator. Another person was already in the car, so we remained silent. One could never be too careful with confidential information. We rode the car up to the third floor, exited, and trailed the woman to an office at the end of the corridor. The nameplate on the door read
DETECTIVE V. BOOTH
. I found myself wondering what the
V
stood for.
Valerie? Vivian? Violet?
She stood at the door as we stepped inside, closing it behind us.

Stacks of files stood like a paper skyline at the edge of the detective’s desk, flanked by an automatic stapler and an ivy that looked desperate for a drink of water. While the detective rounded her cluttered desk, Agent Hohenwald dropped into one of the two seats facing it and I perched on the other, setting my briefcase down beside me.

Hohenwald made a quick, unceremonious introduction. “Detective Booth, Special Agent Holloway. Agent Holloway, Detective Booth.”

Booth and I shook hands over the desktop and offered each other polite smiles.

“What’s the
V
stand for?” I asked.

“Veronica,” she replied.

That minor mystery had been easily solved. But getting the goods on Tino Fabrizio was sure to be far more challenging.

As we began our powwow, Booth summarized the situation for me. “Giustino Fabrizio is suspected in the deaths or disappearances of at least ten men in the Dallas area over the last five years. Most of the men had worked for him in one capacity or another, some officially, others unofficially.”

Yikes!
And to think I sometimes complained about my job. At least my boss wasn’t out to kill me. “So Tino made sure those who knew his secrets didn’t live to tell them?”

“Exactly,” Booth replied. “Anyone who had dirt on the guy ended up buried in dirt themselves.”

The mere thought had me brushing imaginary muck from my arms.

She pulled a thick file from a drawer. “Agent Hohenwald asked me to share my file on Fabrizio with you.” She held it out to me. “Take a look, then we can address any questions you might have.”

My tax case files contained innocuous things like spreadsheets and bank statements. But police files could be far more gruesome. I took the hefty file from her and inhaled a deep breath to steel myself.

chapter two

O
dds and Ends

I opened the folder on my lap. The first two items in Booth’s file were recent police reports addressing the disappearance of two men on the same night. One of the men who’d gone missing was a professional locksmith. According to his wife’s statement, he’d received a late-night call, purportedly from someone who’d locked himself out of his house and needed emergency service. The locksmith failed to return home to his wife and two children.

Booth gestured to the report. “We considered whether he might have simply abandoned his family, but that possibility was quickly ruled out. By all accounts he’d been a dedicated husband and father.”

And, as the report noted, he’d taken nothing with him, not even his prized baseball card collection or his beloved Labrador retriever.

The other man, who was unmarried but living with a girlfriend, was a personal trainer who also provided freelance bodyguard services on a contractor basis. He, too, had received a late-night call, told his girlfriend it was work-related, and left in a hurry, never to come back home. He had also left all of his possessions behind, and had made no contact with anyone, not a family member, neighbor, or friend.

No trace of either man had been found, and according to the reports, both had left their cell phones at home.
Odd.

As I looked up in thought, my eyes spotted water stains on the ceiling tiles in the detective’s office. The building must have suffered a leak at some point, maybe during the last heavy rain. But the leaky roof wasn’t the issue of the moment. The current issue was,
Why would the victims have left their cell phones behind?
Most people carried their phones with them at all times. Also, per an inquiry to their carriers, no calls had come in to the men’s personal cell phones late that night. More than likely, the men had second, secret phones their loved ones didn’t know about.

Pulling my eyes from the damaged ceiling, I returned my attention to the documentation. My specialized role would be to pursue the financial angles, follow the money trails, so naturally information about suspicious income and expenses caught my eye. The statement made by the locksmith’s wife indicated that he had taken his family on a trip to Hawaii shortly before he disappeared. She’d reported that her husband’s business had been doing especially well in the months preceding his disappearance. The trainer had bought a new Harley-Davidson motorcycle not long before he’d vanished. His girlfriend hadn’t asked where the money to buy the Harley had come from. Maybe she didn’t want to know. “Looks like these two men came into some unexpected funds.”

Booth leaned back in her chair. “Cash payouts from Fabrizio probably accounted for the sudden uptick in income.”

The third item in the file was a police report regarding a mugging that had taken place in the parking lot of a barbecue restaurant late on the same night the men had disappeared. Two masked men had pulled guns on the owner of the restaurant as he went to his car with a zippered bank bag containing the day’s cash intake tucked under his arm. The muggers forced him to hand over the cash, his cell phone, and his keys. By the time he walked to a gas station down the road and called 911, the muggers were long gone.

The victim had uploaded a tracking app to his cell phone, and it was located in a storm drain a half mile away, along with his keys. Neither bore any fingerprints. The report noted that, months before, the victim had hired Fabrizio’s company, Cyber-Shield Security Systems, to install security cameras and provide monitoring services at his restaurant. A still photo, presumably a screen shot of security camera footage, showed a dark image of two men in ski masks with guns pointed at the victim as he stood next to a car. The terrified expression on the man’s face said he was in imminent risk of soiling himself. But who could blame him? The mere photo of the armed thugs had my gut in a clench.

I looked up at Detective Booth. “Given that the mugging victim was a client of Fabrizio’s security company and that the mugging happened on the same night the two men disappeared, you’re thinking there’s a connection?”

“You got it.” She plucked a shriveled leaf from the potted ivy on her desk, ground it to mulch between her fingers, and dropped it into the dirt at the base of the plant. “My guess is the two men who disappeared were the ones who mugged the restaurant owner. Fabrizio probably offed them afterward and disposed of their bodies somewhere. He’s not the kind of guy who leaves loose ends.”

“Did the locksmith or trainer have criminal records?” I asked.

“The trainer had a couple of assaults on his rap sheet. He gave a previous girlfriend a black eye and he’d beat the snot out of someone who’d accidentally backed into his motorcycle in a parking lot. The locksmith had a theft charge. He’d made a duplicate key when installing new locks at a private home. He went back later and attempted to rob the house. The homeowners came home and caught him in the act. He covered his face and ran off, but they’d already recognized him.”

It didn’t surprise me that the missing men weren’t exactly choirboys. Dirty work was done by dirty men.

Booth went on to tell me that it had taken years for Dallas PD to connect the dots and realize Fabrizio had likely played a role in several unsolved crimes. “Too many crime victims have been clients of Fabrizio’s security company for it to be mere coincidence.”

Most were too afraid to point fingers at Tino Fabrizio, to implicate him in extortion, but the detective surmised the victims suspected that the man who was supposed to protect them and their businesses was, in fact, the one who’d preyed upon them instead.

“Fabrizio’s approach is typical,” Booth said. “He focuses his extortion efforts on people running mom-and-pop-type businesses. They’re easier to intimidate and they control their business’s finances.”

I supposed it would be more difficult to extort money from a large business client, where the staff member working with Cyber-Shield’s salesman probably had no access to the company’s coffers and would be more likely to report the extortion attempt to upper management.

“I’ve spoken with Fabrizio in person,” Booth said. “Strangely enough, the guy didn’t give off a single bad vibe. He seemed about as threatening as Barney the dinosaur.”

I was familiar with the show, which was filmed locally at the studios in Las Colinas. Fitting, I supposed, since the oil Texas was famous for originated from the bodies of dinosaurs that had roamed the state millions of years ago before keeling over to take a permanent dirt nap. Many claimed a meteor did the big beasts in, but I speculated that perhaps they’d snacked on a few too many lantana, a native wildflower that was pretty but poisonous.

Booth continued. “Of course when I spoke with Tino I didn’t let on that I suspected he might be involved in the crimes. I just asked for any evidence his security company might have. He provided me with copies of the camera footage.”

I flipped to the next page to find a photograph of a very muscular, but very dead, man lying on a weight bench in a residential garage. A barbell loaded with what looked to be hundreds of pounds of weights rested across his neck. His right arm crooked back under the bar at such an angle it must have snapped under the pressure. My stomach squirmed inside me as I looked up at the detective. “What happened to this guy?”

“Crushed windpipe. By the looks of it he was working out in his home gym without a spotter and got a little overzealous. But I think Fabrizio killed him. This guy had been on Cyber-Shield’s payroll for a while, driving one of the security patrol vehicles. He probably knew too much and became a liability.”

I turned to the next page in the file and—
gukh!
—suffered an immediate gag reflex. A full-color photograph depicted a man folded over a wrought-iron fence, a pointy post—and approximately six inches of lower intestine—protruding through his lower back. A river of blood had flowed from the fatal wound and down his legs, forming a crimson pond at the base of the fence. The dead man wore blue jeans, a green sweater, and a red Santa hat.

I looked up at Detective Booth. “I’m guessing this wasn’t an accident, either?”

“He was stringing Christmas lights on his roof when he ‘
fell
.’” She made air quotes with her fingers.

“Any witnesses?”

“Conveniently, no.”

“But he’s linked to Fabrizio?”

“That’s a good question. Many of the men Tino Fabrizio hires to do his dirty work have other jobs, like the trainer and locksmith. None of them told anyone they were moonlighting for Fabrizio, but I’m sure he makes it clear they better keep their mouths shut. Santa there,” she said, gesturing at the photo, “was an electrician. We think he might have arranged an electrical fire one of Fabrizio’s security clients suffered.”

I was almost afraid to flip to the next page. But it couldn’t get any worse, could it?

It could.

My gag reflex went into overdrive.
Gukh-gukh-gukh!

The next page featured a close-up photo of a man’s face with two dozen steel nails protruding from it, the ones in his eye sockets buried up to their heads in his retinas and spongy brain. It looked as if the man had been attacked by an evil acupuncturist. Blood ran from the wounds, nearly coating his face in red rivulets.

Detective Booth didn’t wait for my inevitable question. “The man in that photo was a building contractor. He was allegedly trying to repair a malfunctioning nail gun he’d ‘forgotten’ to unplug.” She made air quotes again. “Again, there were no witnesses. We think he might have been in on a theft of a Cyber-Shield client where a bulldozer was used to knock down a wall. The client’s safe was scooped up and carried off.”

I could go on and detail the rest of the file, but I’d likely lose my lunch. I’d eaten spicy Mexican food that had burned going down, so I definitely didn’t want it coming back up.
Moving on, then.

“With so many victims having a link to Tino,” the detective said, “it’s clear the man played a role in the crimes. Problem is, Tino knows how to distance himself. If law enforcement is ever going to bring this man to justice, someone’s going to have to catch him in the act.”

But what act might it be?
My spinning mind tossed out one gruesome scenario after another until I willed it to stop with a firm shake of my head.

Hohenwald chimed in now. “The FBI has done its best to gather evidence that would directly link Fabrizio to an offense, but stakeout after stakeout had gotten us nowhere. We’ve followed Tino, of course. We’ve also tracked his salesmen, installers, and security patrols all the way from Dallas to Timbuktu, hoping they might help us figure out which client Tino might be planning to target next. But we’re never in the right place at the right time. We can’t seem to pin anything on him. That’s why I decided it was time to involve the IRS in the investigation.”

And that’s where I came in. If Tino Fabrizio couldn’t be nailed for extortion or murder, we might at least be able to charge him with tax evasion or money laundering. The strategy had worked on Al Capone and many a mobster since. Might as well go with tried-and-true methods, right?

“If anyone can get this guy,” I told the two of them, “it’s the Internal Revenue Service.” Cocky of me to say so, perhaps, but I knew personally just how good we agents at the IRS were. With any luck, we’d be able to put together a tax case against the man before he could strike again.

The detective chuckled, nonplussed. “All righty, then,” she said, holding out her hand for a good-bye shake. “Go get ’im, tiger.”